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Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Ruberry: What would Reagan do?

Yeah, this one hurts. Four more years of Obama. Four more years of high
unemployment and stagnation. ObamaCare isn't going away.

What to do? Look at went wrong. Yes, the Republican Party needs to expand its base. America isn't getting any whiter.

What would Ronald Reagan think? Here is what he wrote for the National Review after Barry Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964:

Yes, we did; we lost a battle in the continuing war for freedom, but our
position is not untenable. First of all, there are 26 million of us and
we can't be explained away as diehard party faithfuls. We cross party
lines in our dedication to a philosophy.

There are no plans for retreating from our present positions, but we
can't advance without reinforcements. Are reinforcements available? The
answer is an unhesitating — “Yes!” They are to be found in the millions
of so-called Republican defectors — those people who didn't really want
LBJ, but who were scared of what they thought we represented. Read that
sentence very carefully because in my opinion it tells the story. All of
the landslide majority did not vote against the conservative
philosophy; they voted against a false image our Liberal opponents
successfully mounted. Indeed it was a double false image. Not only did
they portray us as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status
quo, but they took for themselves a costume of comfortable
conservatism. Read again their campaign fiction and you will find their
normal flamboyant Liberalism hidden under the protective coloration of
"the great society," or as Hubert Horatio Humphrey (who can't ask what
time it is without conducting a filibuster) put it: "We don’t want a
planned society — we want society planning."

Comments

Yeah, this one hurts. Four more years of Obama. Four more years of high
unemployment and stagnation. ObamaCare isn't going away.

What to do? Look at went wrong. Yes, the Republican Party needs to expand its base. America isn't getting any whiter.

What would Ronald Reagan think? Here is what he wrote for the National Review after Barry Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964:

Yes, we did; we lost a battle in the continuing war for freedom, but our
position is not untenable. First of all, there are 26 million of us and
we can't be explained away as diehard party faithfuls. We cross party
lines in our dedication to a philosophy.

There are no plans for retreating from our present positions, but we
can't advance without reinforcements. Are reinforcements available? The
answer is an unhesitating — “Yes!” They are to be found in the millions
of so-called Republican defectors — those people who didn't really want
LBJ, but who were scared of what they thought we represented. Read that
sentence very carefully because in my opinion it tells the story. All of
the landslide majority did not vote against the conservative
philosophy; they voted against a false image our Liberal opponents
successfully mounted. Indeed it was a double false image. Not only did
they portray us as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status
quo, but they took for themselves a costume of comfortable
conservatism. Read again their campaign fiction and you will find their
normal flamboyant Liberalism hidden under the protective coloration of
"the great society," or as Hubert Horatio Humphrey (who can't ask what
time it is without conducting a filibuster) put it: "We don’t want a
planned society — we want society planning."